About Equifax

Bankruptcy Navigator Index (BNI)

Predicts the likelihood of a consumer becoming bankrupt within the next 24 months. Our latest release places special emphasis on the prediction of bankruptcy on high value accounts helping lenders reduce losses by better identifying large balance bankruptcies. BNI can be validated over 12 or 24-months to compare with other scores.

Key Features:

By developing based on recent credit and mortgage data, BNI identifies more current risk behavior.

BNI identifies bankruptcy behaviour not captured in any delinquency score.

Can be used online at the point of sale for immediate scoring or off-line to provide an enhanced view of consumer risk.

How It Works

BNI provides additional validation to the credit risk assessment process, by identifying a different pattern of behaviour, that of acute financial stress rather than chronic delinquency. Identifying high bankruptcy risk consumers who are in good standing with their accounts allows the risk manager to account for a different type of credit risk, and can optimize strategies to be profitable and successful.

Built exclusively by Equifax, BNI uses advanced, statistical processes based on Canadian data, including mortgage data, to predict the likelihood of consumer bankruptcy within the next 24 months. BNI returns a score from 1 to 999 for each consumer. The higher the score, the less likely the customer will experience a bankruptcy within two years compared to customers with lower BNI scores.

BNI provides insights that enable your business to assess and manage accounts and add insight to early stage collections. BNI can be used in the adjudication process to approve or decline applications; refine offers or use risk-based pricing; and identify cross-sell opportunities.. Account management initiatives that can benefit from BNI are managing credit limits; determining authorization decisions; implementing retention activities; identifying upsell opportunities. BNI can assist in early stage collection best practices by driving delinquency management prioritization based on lowest risk and highest probability of recovery or employing delinquent account base segmentation tactics.